• NASA
  • IPAC

Summer Visit - 2025 - IMPULS

The summer visit to Caltech is 4 days long and is the only time during the year of work when all the participants on the team come together in person to work intensively on the data. Generally, each educator may bring up to two students to the summer visit that are paid for by NITARP, and they may raise funds to bring two more. The teams work at Caltech; the summer visit typically includes a half-day tour of JPL, which is a favorite site for group photos. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The IMPULS team came to visit in July 2025. The 4 core team educators attended, plus 6 students.

Quotes

  • [student:] I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and use math for something that's not just math class.
  • [Qualities needed for being an astronomer:] Perseverance; gotta be ok with failure and asking questions but also needing to be ok with working on the problem and beating your head against the wall (metaphorically or not) until the problem is solved or until you can put it down for the day and pick it back up. Also critical thinking and problem solving -- encountering problems is going to be common but finding out “why” or leaving some as “unknown” is pivotal; not everything needs to be finite but solving the questions even with “I don’t know but no one else does so its all speculation” is a much needed quality/skill to have. Leaving it as “meh idk and i'll just move on” doesn’t work for many problems.
  • The most interesting thing was probably the people: for the team to meet each other, to hear the stories of your IPACmates, and to be able to chat with them over donuts. “Scientist” seems like such a vague, far-away concept (especially for students, but for me, too), that it’s always fascinating to hear that they’re (usually) normal folks just a few different decisions from where we ended up. I think it was a great and eye-opening opportunity for our students to realize that, no matter where they come from, no matter what unique talents they may have, they could find a place for themselves in the science community.
  • I have a much better picture of what it means to be an astronomer: peering at computer screens and organizing data sets! But I really love the work and am eager to learn more as the process unfolds.
  • I still get confused about the variety of light curves, and trying to decipher what is going on with a star by looking at the light curves and SEDs, but working together with my students and the rest of the team I am getting the hang of it!

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2025 - IMPULS